He spoke with extreme conviction, almost as though he had the gift of foresight. In all our lives together, it was the one subject on which we had deeply disagreed. Yet he spoke as though he were reading the future.
We turned back, each of us heavy with his thoughts. Then Roy said: “I used to be sorry that I hurt you. When I tried to fall in on the opposite side.”
Between the gabled houses, the shadows were dramatic; Roy’s face was pale, brilliantly lit on one cheek, the features unnaturally sharp.
“I was clutching at anything, of course,” he said.
“Yes.”
“It was my last grab.” He smiled. “It left me with nothing, didn’t it? Or with myself.”
The clocks struck from all round us. He said lightly: “I’m keeping you up. I mustn’t. High officials need to become respectable. It’s time you did, you know. Part of your duties.”
34: Surrender and Relief
Shortly after we returned from Basel, Roy’s department was moved out of London, and I did not see him for some months. But I heard of him — just once, but in a whisper that one believes as soon as one hears, one seems to have known it before. I heard of him in a committee meeting: it was Houston Eggar who told me, in a moment’s pause between two items on the agenda.
We used to meet in the Old Treasury, in a room which overlooked Whitehall itself, just to the north of Downing Street. It was a committee at under-secretary level, which was set up to share out various kinds of supplies; there were several different claimants — Greece, when she was still in the war, partisan groups which were just springing up by the end of the summer of 1941, when this meeting took place, and neutrals such as Turkey.
The committee behaved (as I often thought, with frantic irritation or human pleasure, according to the news or my own inner weather) remarkably like a college meeting. Each of the members was representing a ministry, and so was speaking to instructions. Sometimes he was at one with his instructions, and so expressed them with energy and weight; Houston Eggar, for instance, could nearly always feel as the Foreign Office felt. Sometimes a member did not like them; sometimes a strong character was etching out a line for himself, and one saw policy shaped under one’s eyes by a series of small decisions. (In fact, it was rare for policy to be clearly thought out, though some romantics or worshippers of “great men” liked to think so. Usually it built itself from a thousand small arrangements, ideas, compromises, bits of give-and-take. There was not much which was decisively changed by a human will. Just as a plan for a military campaign does not spring fully-grown from some master general; it arises from a sort of Brownian movement of colonels and majors and captains, and the most the general can do is rationalise it afterwards.) Sometimes one of the committee was over-anxious to ingratiate himself or was completely distracted by some private grief.
As in a college meeting, the reasons given were not always close to the true reasons. As in a college meeting, there was a public language — much of which was common to both. That minatory phrase “in his own best interests” floated only too sonorously round Whitehall. The standard of competence and relevance was much higher than in a college meeting, the standard of luxurious untrammelled personality perceptibly lower. Like most visitors from outside, I had formed a marked respect for the administrative class of the civil service. I had lived among various kinds of able men, but I thought that, as a group, these were distinctly the ablest. And they loved their own kind of power.
Houston Eggar loved his own kind of power. He loved to think that a note signed by him affected thousands of people. He loved to speak in the name of the Foreign Office: “my department”, said Houston Eggar with possessive gusto. It was all inseparable as flesh and blood from his passion for getting on, his appetite for success — which, as it happened, still did not look certain to be gratified. It had become a race with the end of the war. He was forty-eight in 1941, and unless the war ended in five or six years he stood no chance of becoming an ambassador. However, he was a man who got much pleasure from small prizes; his CMG had come through in the last honours list, which encouraged him; he plunged into the committee that afternoon, put forward his argument with his usual earnestness and vigour, and thoroughly enjoyed himself.
He was propounding the normal Foreign Office view that, since the amount of material was not large, it was the sensible thing to distribute it in small portions, so that no one should be quite left out; we should thus lay up credit in days to come. The extreme alternative view was to see nothing but the immediate benefit to the war, get a purely military judgment, and throw all this material there without any side-glances. There was a whole spectrum of shades between the two, but on the whole Eggar tended to be isolated in that company and had to work very hard for small returns. It was so that day. But he was surprisingly effective in committee; he was not particularly clever, but he spoke with clarity, enthusiasm, pertinacity and above all weight. Even among sophisticated men, weight counted immeasurably more than subtlety or finesse.
Accordingly he secured a little more than the Foreign Office could reasonably expect. It was a hot afternoon, and he leaned back in his chair, mopping his forehead. He always got hot in the ardour of putting his case. He beamed. He was happy to have won a concession.
I was due to speak on the next business, but the chairman was looking through his papers. I was sitting next to Eggar; he pushed an elbow along the table, and leant towards me. He said in a low voice, casual and confidentiaclass="underline" “So Calvert is getting his release.”
“What?”
“He has got his own way. Good luck to him. I told his chief there’s no use trying to keep a man who is determined to go.”
“Where is he going?”
Eggar looked incredulous, as though I must know.
“Where is he going?” I said.
“Oh, he wants to fly, of course. It’s quite natural.”
I had known nothing of it, not a word, not a hint. For a second, I felt physically giddy. A blur of faces went round me. Then it steadied. I heard the chairman’s voice, a little impatient: “Isn’t this a matter for you, Eliot?”
“I’m sorry, Mr Chairman,” I said, and mechanically began to explain a new piece of government machinery. I could hear my own words, faint and toneless like words in a dream — yet they came out in a shape fluent, practised, articulate. It was too hard to break the official habit. One was clamped inside one’s visor.
Eggar left before the end of the meeting, and so I could not get another word with him. I put through a call to Roy’s office, but he was out. I gave a message for him: would he telephone me at my flat, without fail, after eleven that night?
I went straight from my office to have dinner with Lady Muriel and Joan. They had come to London in the first week of the war, and were living in the Boscastles’ town house in Curzon Street. They were extravagantly uncomfortable. The house was not large, judged by the magnificent criterion of Boscastle (Lord Boscastle’s grandfather had sold the original town mansion); but it was a good deal too large for two women, both working at full-time jobs. It was also ramshackle and perilously unsafe. Nothing would persuade Lady Muriel to forsake it. A service flat seemed in her eyes common beyond expression — as for danger, she dismissed us all as a crowd of “jitterbugs” getting the idiom wrong. “This disturbance is much exaggerated,” she said, and slept with a soundness that infuriated many of us and put us to shame.